Archive for July, 2017

People are simple. And love to be simple. That’s why, for most of them, aside from their profession, all they know is “sports”, and it’s a new religion. Being complicated is expensive.

One commenter on my site, Benign, apparently obfuscated by my broadside against the delirious sexism of past and present Catholicism, called me “deluded to think that “rationality” even exists. Evolution does not “progress.” The Soviets “rationally” outlawed marriage from ~1918 to the 1940s, before realizing that this “rational” decision didn’t work.”

The USSR outlawed marriage???????? Same source which saw them drinking blood of “capitalists”? Logic is easy, truth is hard.

Modernist, Postmodernist, Metamodernist Jargon Is Jargon, and jargon ain’t truth! “Meta”, though, is a serious operation we all practice. See “Mind From Meta“.

Marriage is a fact of human ethology, the natural behavior of humans. To outlaw it would not have been irrational, because reason can always be found, but futile, as going against marriage goes against human nature. This is exactly why the Soviets didn’t outlaw marriage: they were not that dumb.

By the late 1920s, Soviet adults had been made more responsible for the care of their children, and common-law marriage had been given equal legal status with civil marriage. Is that what Benign alludes to? By 1944, the Soviets went back, and recognized only legal civil marriage, to encourage more steady families.

Rationality exists, but as I have emphasized in the past, as a constant rolling of the drums, a logic can be anything. That evolution “progresses” is a battle from 1800 CE, when Lamarck asserted this thesis. It’s correct: clearly some of today’s lifeforms are the most complex ever. Some day all biologists will proudly view Lamarck as right, and their predecessors of the 1960s, who were fanatically anti-Lamarck, as deluded bigots.

How do I know Lamarck was right? Tons of knowledge that those who scream Lamarck was a maniac (following the slave master Napoleon) never heard of these tons, they are children.

To see evolution’s progress, don’t look at sharks, or oysters, and other animals in evolutionary stasis. Instead, look at Blue Rorquals, most massive animals ever, & look at us, most clever. The most advanced animals are the most complex, and they are complex in ways beyond what we understand of genetics.

Beatles sang: “All You Need Is Love!”. Silly stuff: we all got love, otherwise we won’t exist. We have all the logics, at our disposal, and all the love we got as children.

To order and discipline our logic, and even our loves, most of what we need is truth

“Postmodernism” was the realization that many ideologies were the fruit of tribalism, not truth (as they malevolently claimed). This is not really new. See “vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà“ de Pascal (a thought unpublished in his lifetime: truth before the Pyrénées, error beyond them)..

“Deconstruction” consisted in finding out where things came from. It’s not conceptually different from analysis (a unloosening), a concept found in Aristotle, and obvious centuries before him.

All this is to say that those who have pretended to introduce new ways of thinking about thinking have eschewed the truth: there is no truth, but truth, and, in the human species, it’s as old as dinner . There is no truth, but truth! In the human species, truth is as old as dinner. No truth, no dinner for the human, but one for the lion. The truth was in the dinner. In how to get dinner!

Right, truth is dangerous, because some claim to have it, and they don’t. But they always have, and always will. The Wise can’t go around, claiming they don’t have the truth, as Socrates did, or, worse, as Socrates claimed again and again, and the self-declared “post-modernists” parroted, that there is no truth… Because if they do that, they do exactly what German Jews (among others) did with Hitler and his Nazis: leave a wide open field for infamy to proclaim its own version of truth. And everybody, or, at least, most Germans, believed them. And others, like most Americans, pretended that it was OK with them.

The scientific method does NOT opposes the notion of truth, as those who have only a shallow knowledge of pop science are all too often led to believe. It’s exactly the opposite. Euclid’s theorem or the classical laws of optics are still true… They are actually more true than ever. In their domain of application. They are more true than ever, precisely because now we know where their domain of application came from. In other words, we control their meta-logic. We know where their truth come from, and where it’s located. And how to control it.

Catholicism, as practiced in the past, would clearly be unlawful today: all the great leaders of Christianism of five centuries ago, would be condemned to live in prison, but for those who would end their lives in psychiatric asylum. Should they resist by force, their fighters would have been eliminated as if they were the worst Jihadists, defending holocausts, or Aztec warriors, defending cannibalism.

Catholicism, in its original form, its ancient form, its Salafist form, prescribed many atrocities (later carbon-copied by Islam). I will concentrate here just on a particularly inhuman prescription, sexism. Sexism is against nature, because the human species has evolved with little difference between males and females. This goes at the root of what it means to be human.

Catholicism says women are inferior creatures. This hurtful outrage is an ultra-violent contradiction of common human decency, common sense, science, human ethology, and human rights. Mass organizations violating both science and human rights should be outlawed.

Catholic churchmen are still free to proselytize their contempt, not to say, hatred of women. Women can’t become priests, bishops, cardinals or popes: they are clearly viewed by the Catholic Church as inferior, misleading, depraved creatures. Why should such preaching be legal?

Tyrant Constantine front and left, directs the Nicaea Council 325 CE, as seen in the 16 C….

To be fair, this religious misogyny started before Catholicism. Catholicism was an invention of the Roman Tyrant Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, in 325 CE (presently located in Islamizing Turkey). Constantine, born at York in England, son of his father, a “Caesar”, was a psychopath who conquered the entire Roman empire. Constantine killed his nephew, his wife and his highly successful son, just because he could. That was enough qualifications for Constantine to be made a saint by the Orthodox Church.

The earliest Christian writer is known as the so-called “Saint” Paul. I put “Saint” in quote, unquote, because in my religion no sexist pig is a saint. Saint Paul was a sexist, man-obsessed pig. I have nothing against homosexuals of the male gender, as long as they don’t disparage woman. But Saint Paul did.

The Apostle Paul wrote that the “husband is head” and “wives, submit“, and that he was divinely inspired to write what he wrote… Catholic groups diverge in their interpretation of the following passage. Saint Paul wrote:

“But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.[1Cor 11:3–9]

In the first seven centuries after emperor Constantine, the self-described “13th Apostle” and certified bloody monster of the tyrannical type, priests could marry: Catholicism was overviewed by the Franks, who attached a lot of importance to living like Pagans, and (relatively) non-sexist Germans. The Franks had reinterpreted Catholicism their way. However, by 1026 CE, for the first time in centuries, the Catholic church was able to execute heretics.

What had changed? What had allowed Catholicism to draped itself in, and drip with, blood? Why the relapse into mass murdering theocratic fascism? Plutocracy unbound. The rise of plutocracy, self-described as “aristocracy”: hereditary positions of the wealthiest and the mightiest needed a mood to nurture their capture of civilization, and they had to justify that by the fascist Judeo-Christian god and His torturous, sexist ways.

At that point, the men who viewed women as objects of natural sexual interest were discouraged to join the Catholic Church. Men who preferred men were prefered. And naturally men who love children as sex objects.

So here we are: the Catholic hierarchy is stuffed with sex pedophiles. And the Catholic Church can’t deny this, lest it denies itself.

The present Pope talks a big talk, but he is, at the very least, sympathetic to pedophiles. A fact. For a millennium, the Catholic Church has induced its professionals to approach children, with love (pedo-philia, literally) rather than approach adult women, with love. Thus all too many professional Catholics came to view children as sex objects. And getting away with it. A striking example is the right hand man of the present Pope, now back in Australia to face damning charges… Francis I gives moral lessons to entire planet, but socialized for years with an outrageous pedophile.

“Well into Pope Francis’s pontificate, one of his closest aides, the third-highest official in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, has now been credibly accused of several acts of sexual assault, including one of rape. Australian police have concluded that the evidence they have is sufficient to move forward, even in cases that happened long ago… A cloud has hung over Pell since he was an Episcopal vicar in a parish in the 1970s that has been described as a “pedophile’s paradise and a child’s nightmare. A full 15 years ago, Pell was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy but when the church investigated, a retired Supreme Court justice found that there wasn’t enough evidence, even though the victim appeared to be “speaking honestly from actual recollection.” A year later, Pope John Paul II made Pell a cardinal. Several new alleged victims spoke out in a book published only last month. In 2015, Australia’s Channel 9 ran a 60 Minutes segment that can only be called horrifying. In it, one of Francis’s own appointees to investigate sex abuse, Peter Saunders, described Pell’s record on sexual abuse as “almost sociopathic.” Pell had a “catalogue of denials … a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness,” Saunders said on camera. “I would go as far to say that I consider him to be quite a dangerous individual…

The notorious case of the founder of the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, comes to mind. Protected by Pope John Paul II, coddled by Benedict XVI, he was also defended by an array of theological arch-conservatives as a paragon of virtue… It comes as no surprise, for example, that Pell has upheld, like Maciel, a highly conservative theology on sexuality — which was why he was so favored by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He opposed the use of condoms to stop AIDS in Africa, refused to give communion to openly gay people, campaigned strenuously against marriage equality, and described the church sex-abuse scandal as not a function of minor abuse and cover-up but of allowing homosexuals to be priests (a ban on gay seminarians remains formally in place). In his own words: “80 percent of the abuse is with young boys. So I mean it’s obviously connected with the problem of homosexuality … We’ve got to see that [homosexuality] is not tolerated amongst clergy and religious orders.” To which I have to echo David Ridsdale: “Fuck you, George, and everything you stand for.”

What I cannot understand is why Pope Francis chose to advance this man under this cloud so high up the hierarchy. If Pell is found guilty, Francis will have advanced an accused abuser of children to the highest echelon in the Vatican. Far from cleaning the church of this evil, he will have contaminated it at its very apex. That’s why this case is indeed a watershed for Catholicism and Francis himself. If Francis can turn a blind eye to this, we can trust no one.”

What is there, not to understand? It’s in plain sight! The Catholic Church is intrinsically dangerous: most Catholics, with the possible exception of Saint Martin, Saint Francis and a few others, are toxic for civilization, because they abuse not just little boys, but reason. As Emperor Julian had diagnosed around 360 CE, Catholicism was very dangerous to civilization, just because of that point ( and basically all the great social advances ascribed to Roman Catholicism originated in Rome, not Catholicism, which piggy-backed on Rome). Catholicism was basically PC, Political Correctness, gone self-sanctifying and lethal. Many of the Saints of Catholicism were mass-criminally insane (example Saint Bernard, author of the Second Crusade, more Pope than the Pope Himself, and from a Pluto family, to boot; same for the demented Saint Louis, author of more insane texts than the Marquis de Sade, but not meant to be fiction, but all too real threats…)

Sexism is not legal. Sexism should not be preached. Private conversation is one thing, public address, another. Preaching sexism should be unlawful.

The reasons to crack down now on Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Judaism are multiple. An obvious reason is that, each time perverse religions dwell in hyper-sexism, the practitioners of these nasty primitive faiths point at Christianism. Islamists, in particular, claim that sexism Naive philosophers such as Michel Onfray make the situation worse by calling our civilization “Judeo-Christian”. That leaves us no choice, but to carpet bomb “Judeo-Christianism” into smithereens.

A more advanced reason is that we need humanity to be as intelligent as possible, as soon as possible: the easiest way to do that is to insure women have the same access to education, and to the motivation to acquire education, as men. Mostly women mostly educate children, early on, keep that in mind: a sexist society is necessarily a more stupid society than it otherwise would be, absent the sexism.

Still an even more overwhelming reason is that we have entered the age of reason. It’s reason, or die.

A hint: the young thermonuclear cannibal in North Korea. The irrationality of Catholicism, which views, half of humanity as inferior (same as (Islamism), and enforces that vision, should not be tolerated, but eradicated.

Everybody needs somebody to love. The Catholic Church says that men should not love women. The Pope, Francis, says this. His collaborators, not to call them accomplices, are left to love small children, because small children are all they have around, aside from each other and their perverse ideology. Enough. You want to fight Islamism? Fighting the abuses of Catholicism may be the easiest way to start doing so.

Mass irrationality implementing stupidity is not just deeply inhuman. It implies the end of intelligence. Perhaps of intelligence in the galaxy. This is not just about us. Let’s make sexist mass ideologies seriously preached unlawful: at some point civilization has to progress.

Rihanna is another miracle on legs similarly to the hyper blonde Colombian Shakira, or Beyonce a very pretty package who incorporated tricks invented in places such as 1950s strip bars, all over. I must recognize she seems to have more brains and more advanced, more intelligent and controversial passions.

63 million of children are known to not go to school in developing countries But the delightful future billionaire exhibitionist Rihanna, expert in sideways glances, eyelids down, wants to help.

Glad to see Rihanna cares about getting educated, this site is all about education. Rihanna has pretty violent videos out there, which meet, of course, my approbation, as thoroughly educative programs. I approve of showing violence, because violence there is, and it festers more if it can stay stealthy. Making it obvious deprives it of stealth, hence surprise, half of a successful aggression.

Rihanna has sold more than 250 million records, and was named the 2017 Harvard University Humanitarian of the Year (so, apparently Harvard doesn’t mind so much the violence anymore…). Intriguingly, Rihanna’s latest boyfriend, Hasan Jameel, is a wealthy plutocrat (two billion dollars plus), a Saudi heir. No doubt she can improve his education, open new perspectives on the worth of woman.

So the pulpy Caribbean native may get money for education, but the problem of poorly-developing countries do not arise because not enough money has been thrown at education. One problem is that throwing money at developing countries just enrich plutocrats, local or global. If a country is headed by plutocrats, feeding them is like feeding crocodiles in a crocodile farm.

Poorly developing countries have fundamentally the same two problems:1. bad administration arising from dictatorship and, or wrong ideology. 2. Not being part of an empire. It goes without saying that self-described good people will view such views with a jaundiced eye, because their own “good” logic tells them developing countries are good and empires are bad.

Take Islam, where women are legislatively, half of men, cloistered and forbidden the freedom human ethology gives them. They end up somewhat stupid and acculturated. As women are frontlines for educating children, the next generation of Islamist children will be more stupid and uneducated than they would be otherwise.Hence a vicious circle.

When Lebanon and Syria were administered by France, they were doing well. They didn’t do good before that, under the Caliphate, or after that, under the dictatorships.

National education without appropriate administration to make it sustainable is a non sequitur. One can’t have an appropriate administration without proper command and control. In other words, an appropriate empire.

When thinking of empire, people tend to think of malevolent empires on military rampages; the invasive Caliphates, the Mongols, Napoleon, etc. But the greatest civilizations were, and are, empires. China formed giant empires and owe its persistence to empires (as its brush with annihilation when Genghis Khan conquered it shows). The Greco-Roman world defined an empire which in turn defines today’s civilization, when properly extended to its roots (Egypt, Phoenicia, Crete) and its successors (the Franks who created the “Occident” in which we all bathe now).

Right now, whether we like it or not, we are in a world empire. It’s called the United Nations, and it’s not a democracy. And that’s very good as some nations proved culturally unable to distinguish between civilization and genocide (of Japan, Germany, Italy and their allies we think).

The UN is composed essentially of two components: the West, and China. (Russia and the USA are two colonies of the West; Russia, from the Vikings, plus back influence from the Greeks mostly; the USA is the double descendant of France, as England herself was a Franco-Frankish creation.)

The UN empire has not been extended in all corners. Actually “decolonization” was more of a de-administrationalization substituting often a republican form to more dictatorial variants. For example, under the french, Algeria was arguably under the (defective and unjust) administration of various (French) parties, some on the right, some on the left. Since “independence”, Algeria has been under the administration of just one party. Actually, the present president of Algeria, Bouteflika, was one of the principals of the Algerian “revolution”, so he has been in power personally for nearly 70 years… Yes, he is in a wheelchair, and gets repaired periodically in France.

Now the empire needs to be re-extended in all corners. It is in these distant corners not under direct imperial control that war and lack of education, rule. An example is the confines of Congo where an unsavory interaction between Rwanda military, and plutocratic corporations anxious for minerals, brought five million dead, let alone poor education.

Other muscular interventions are needed. Interpretations of Islam which subjugate women more than men need to be discouraged much more (although with Saudi Arabia in charge of enforcing this at the UN, the situation has become surrealistic…)

It’s a violent world. The violence is supported by, and supports, a violent lack of advanced, all-encompassing education. Unfortunately impositions of mass violence are nearly never solved pacifically, contrarily to legend(those who are already rolling out Gandhi and Martin Luther King, as they read this, are rolling out people who didn’t make the main effort: the Brits were pulling out of India, anyway, Gandhi arguably made things worse; MLK came long after military force was used massively to end racism in the USA, by president Lincoln, and Eisenhower…)

Lack of education is an imposition of mass violence (teaching is not very costly, so the obstacle to education is not cost, but will, will to impose brutishness). Thus it has to be solved with massive power, the power of proper administration, on the heels of imperial intervention (imperial intervention does not necessarily start with special forces, it can start with judges and accountants).

I don’t doubt Rihanna’s sincerity, which is more than eleven years old. I don’t doubt that micro and local humanitarian help is important. However, it’s little relative to the big picture. When France decolonized itself out of Africa, there was a hospital every one hundred kilometer. France left, the hospitals are mostly gone. In a related phenomenon, the growth of literal Islamist schools directed to very small children, at the detriment of real, secular education, has been all over. Consequence? Islamist invasion and military counter-offensives from the French Republic. Some will whine: leave them alone. But then they contradict themselves. Children don’t chose to die and be uneducated: it’s imposed on them by local potentates, symbiotic with global plutocracy (to which they extent access to resources). Once again, the framework already exists: the UN, with its mighty Security Council.

Want a correct, massive world educational system? Impose a correct, appropriate world empire!

Trump, Macron Didn’t Understand the First Thing these times need: the right emotions, moods, ideas. And those can only spring from democracy. But what contemporaries call democracy, isn’t democratic enough to ripe the fruits of the democratic process. PR. Public Relations, is PC, Politically Correct, but not brainy enough.

Who are these arrogant would-be alpha apes who claim, to themselves, and to us, as loudly as they can, that they can lead humanity? OK, the Constitutions say so. But doesn’t that mean they should be changed? Apparently, the alpha males in a rut, have a large following in the USA and France. The French Army Chief of Staff resigned: he said no man should be followed blindly.

That provision was finally installed in the Bundeswehr’s Constitution. German soldiers’ obedience is now to the Constitution, not the “leader” (guide, Führer…) the same should be made clear to US soldiers.

Trump and Macron have huge military power at their disposal. No single man should have such powers.

What is the country spending the most on the military? The USA, in part by cheating on what “deficit” means (or, to put it milder, by defining the “deficit” completely differently from the way the European Union does. France spends more on the military than Russia, but still it’s not enough: at this point on France rests the defense of the entire European continent from Africa and the Middle East, where a religion has made the place so bad, nobody wants to live there anymore. Much better to bring the mess to Europe, where it’s still clean.

The way for France to pay for it’s military is to do like the USA: with a colossal deficit (no, not the one they talk about, the other one!)

In some ways, Macron is the French Trump. In other ways, Macron is the French Obama: he met with singer Bono yesterday, and is exchanging educational tips with Rihanna, a pseudo-singer, or pseudo-thinker (about how others hold her hips), famous for holding her chest in place during “music” videos, and other Crazy Horse Saloon antics… No activity is ridiculous enough to prevent Macron to luridly engage in it.

Indeed a French Trump: consider the banking connection. Macron came out of nowhere, to be showered with money, many millions of dollars, even housing, by bankers. Trump came out of his father’s wealth to become much more, thanks to bankers, who showered him with money.

The global plutocratic elite “hates” Trump because Trump is a loud mouth, an elephant in a porcelain store. The elite is deadly afraid that Trump will make global plutocracy obvious. Thus the global plutocratic elite much prefer Macron: Macron looks like a meritocrat, when, actually, his main merit was to become the man of plutocrats and bankers, who see in him a new Jesus.

The Economist has found a watchdog it loves. Unfortunately, the way Macron is going, that won’t last… He walks on water, but will finish like May (the leopard shoes sticking out in the background).

France’s military chief of staff, five-star general General Pierre De Villiers, quit, in a loud and very public spat. Emmanuel Macron had declared that defense spending would go down 850 million Euros, after making a campaign where he claimed he would augment military spending by a considerable 12%.

The French Republic is at war in Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Syria, Iraq. In the last 40 years, the French military was deployed in 70 combat operations.

Macron didn’t say to the French military:”I am your leader”, as The Economist pretends he did, by mis-translating “chef”. Macron said:”Je suis votre chef” (“I am your CHIEF”). Do we need a tribal chief, millennia after tribes were rejected as optimal governance?

Macron clearly lied: he said he would augment military spending. As clearly needed, right way. Instead he slashed the military budget. It looks like the screwing of someone who likes to screw people. (Since then the military budget would have been re-established, and then some; a good way to economize would be to withdraw the French military from its operation inside France, which is costly and ridiculous; outlawing nasty Salafist Islam is the way to go.)

This incident also denotes that Macron has understood nothing. Nothing at all. Macron understood nothing at all of what ails the West most. The lack of democracy.

What ails the West most is the lack of democracy. One can’t have democracy, when inequality is too great. Clearly, little chief Macron intents to magnify said inequality further. Usually, when people talk inequality, they evoke the number of the wealthiest versus the number of the poorest, and how far they are. But the ancient Greeks would have looked at something else when quantifying democracy: the lack of isegoria (lack of equality in publicly addressing the People’s Assembly, the Ecclesia). The lack of isegoria would have been viewed as part of a more general lack of isonomy (equality management). In any case, No isegoria, no democracy.

Lack of democracy has led our world to disastrous decisions in economic and sociological matters. It has also led to massive, runaway inequality. Macron was brought to power by the explicit intervention of “adoptive fathers”, such as David Rothschild, who indirectly gave Macron millions, while another plutocrats (lent and) gave him a million Euro apartment in Paris, when Macon was basically a babe. But a babe who had direct oversight on taxing the plutocrats, including Banque Rothschild, which then employed Emmanuel Macron.

Obama didn’t do much, if anything, of what he claimed he would do. Instead, his tenure served the plutocrats. And the proof is that inequality has never been so great in the USA. The case of Macron is clearer: he clearly became “chief” as an instrument of the wealthiest, dirtiest few who have fed him like a hungry baby crocodile. When voters realize the crocodile is just that, a crocodile, growing fast claiming he leads humanity, they will see only barbarity in his whole tenure. Fear the streets. And the army will not rush to Macron’s rescue.

We don’t need to be led by self-aggrandizing psychopaths. We need to be led by the best emotions, moods, and ideas. Clearly, having Macron or Trump as “chiefs” to obey blindly is not one of them.

Everything is wrong with civilization nowadays: the poles are melting, and fast (ice VOLUME is collapsing in the Arctic; some will scoff; however I was evacuated from my house by a giant fire, this essay is written under mental distress, knowing landscapes I loved just burned out to a crisp… the fire is still going on: “austerity” made it so that there were not enough anti-fire planes…). Our great leaders organized all that.

Common people pay lots of taxes, so that, and because, billionaires pay none. Some then sung: all you need is love, all important things in the world are free. Right. Until you realize this: Macron’s educational adviser is Rihanna, the one who holds her chest, as a new form of dancing with self.

The wealthiest people in the world have so much money, so so much power, that they have made, and are making ever more, most people so incredibly stupid, they have no idea what’s going on. They are like bleating sheep going to slaughter. Watch those lesser beings get so thrilled about “sports”, namely tribal frenzies.

Common people pay lots of taxes, so that, and because, billionaires tell them how to think, how not to think, and even how to feel. This is not 1984 anymore, it’s worse.

Abstract: We can edit genetics now. Should we? Of course. It’s the moral thing to do. First, because it’s moral to try to know what we don’t know, even when, and especially when, it’s a great jump in the unknown (I will explain why in a follow-up essay). Second, because, by pushing the CRISPR technology, we can save billions of hours of quality of life for millions of human beings, very soon.

***

In 2012, a collaboration between Jennifer Doudna (from Hawai’i; then a professor at UC Berkeley) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (a French professor from Paris working all over Europe) brought a huge invention. The two collaborating professors harnessed CRISPR into a method to edit DNA at will. Doudna learned first from CRISPR thanks to another female professor at Berkeley.

(Doudna wrote an excellent book on this “A Crack In Creation”, which I highly recommend; the title itself has a triple meaning.)

CRISPR is the abbreviation of: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. They are segments of prokaryotic DNA containing short, repetitive base sequences. These play a key role in a bacterial defence system: bacteria get attacked by viruses, bacteriophages. RNA harboring the spacer sequence helps Cas proteins recognize and cut the enemy (exogenous DNA) in two. Other RNA-guided Cas proteins cut enemy RNA.

Several elements intervene in CRISPR: tracing with RNA attached to a pair of scissors, adding (or not!) what DNA piece one wants, & then automatic repair DNA…

Gene editing proceeds by attaching a DNA-breaking natural bacterial defense against virus to a particular region of the DNA, thanks to a recognizing RNA. Then whatever one wants to splice is brought in by another RNA. DNA.

The potential is to create species at will. Or to remove diseases at will. Let’s hasten to say, that the process can, and has, happened spontaneously in the wild (so to speak). Some patients have had grave genetic diseases they were affected by, disappear, from the cutting effect appearing on its own in one stem cell’s DNA. (If that stem cell had enough descendants to compensate for the deleterious effects of others, wrong-DNA cells, a cure can be achieved!)

Some “bioethicists” are all alarmed by gene editing, and use big words, about the potential damage to life for frivolous pursuits.

Technically, CRISPR alarmists are panicking too early: first, and most importantly, the phenotype does not reduce to the genotype. Human beings’ inheritance is mostly phenotype, not genotype: this is why we can share 99% of our genotype with mice, and still be quite different (except for those addicted to plutocracy, who may as well be mice).

Granted, one should not do whatever. Fluorescent mini-pigs should be amusing, but not if their fluorescence prevents them to sleep. Worse: a very promising, but hyper dangerous technique exists, the GENE DRIVE. In a gene drive, the CRISPR itself is made part of the genetic information which is added.

Promising? Experimentally, some mosquitoes species were then infected with 99.5% success with immunity to the malaria parasite. That would make malaria disappear faster than Bill Gates takes to visit five-star hotels on his way to do whatever in the name of malaria. So it’s an excellent thing. On the danger side, species could be eradicated. That technique could also obviously be weaponized.

***

We are the astonishing the species. Stupendous astonishment is what we do.

What is predictable is not astonishing, and what is truly astonishing, is not predictable.

Such philosophical musings are actually intensely practical. I am going to show how.

***

With CRISPR all genetic diseases become potentially curable: Considering Huntington’s and Duchenne muscular dystrophy leads Doudna to write in her book: “The stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using germline editing.”Strange formulation: the stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using life saving technology?

I shall be even clearer. Those not all out for using CRISPR to cure human diseases are on the same moral side as those who didn’t go all out to prevent Auschwitz, although they knew about it. Yeah, no, I’m not exaggerating, but it’s going to be a bit difficult to explain why.

By editing DNA at will, we become the architect of creation.

When one can alleviate human pain and suffering, absent adverse consequences, one has to do so. It’s a moral imperative. Otherwise one joins the ranks of those who could have done something about Auschwitz, and didn’t. Actually, it’s worse: opposing those who operated Auschwitz clearly had adverse consequences!

***

Same basic story as above, rolled out again to explain better…

Jennifer Doudna: “The truth is, I don’t have answers.” Doudna would like to have the public participate in the debate. However, says Doudna: “There’s a disconnect between the scientific community and mainstream culture, a real degradation in trust by the public. Many scientists — I’m guilty of this too — find it much more fun to do the next experiment in the lab than to take the time to explain to non-specialists what we do or how the scientific process actually works.”

Doudna is still searching for red lines that CRISPR technology shouldn’t cross. “I struggle with the question of crossing boundaries of speciation that are naturally in place” — For example 28,000 people are grafted every year in the USA. The demand is five times that, at least. Raising pigs with human-compatible organs becomes possible with CRISPR. “You might decide that it would be unethical not to do that,” says Doudna, unhelpfully.

I love Doudna. She and Charpentier should get the Nobel. However, she somewhat disingenuously pretends to believe that, given our limited knowledge about the human genome, there shouldn’t be clinical use of CRISPR in the human germ line at present. (She does not really believes this, because she is not an idiot, but she affects to play a fair, Politically Correct game…) But she also admits that the balance is delicate. The same technology that might cure genetic-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Duchenne, diabetes and cancer might someday be used frivolously. Strangely Doudna pretends that “I don’t think that’s going to happen any time very soon, just because we don’t have the knowledge,” Doudna says. “But is it coming in 50 or 100 years?” She pauses to reflect, then says: “Yeah.”

However this is all a fake debate: it has been done with mice. Thus, it can be done with people. Thanks to the People’s Republic of China, it’s going to happen all over human disease. Mr. Xi just inverted the one-child policy established 40 years ago, he can earn more brownie points by curing human diseases.

CRISPR is a wonderful tool, to gather knowledge, and THEN to pontificate upon the morality this knowledge will entail. THEN.

To try to pontificate about the consequences of CRISPR now, when we don’t know so much, is unscientific. It will feed the enemy of the scientific method, by having scientists pretending to think when they can’t. As Doudna herself said, she doesn’t know.

Indeed, the chicken-egg can’t come before the evolution which led to them. So the science has to plough ahead, and inform We The People. Then we can moralize.

Experiment, then moralize.

A reader told me, about the preceding aphorism that “Historically, you have it wrong; even though you may be right”. Right. I was expressing a moral imperative, not a historical observation of how people behaved. Experiment then moralize: the way of the thinker. Moralize, then be careful not to experiment: the way of those on the wrong side of history.

CRISPR is on the right side of history. Follow it, to learn not just how to get more power, but how to become more moral…

When one looks at climate change, one should not look back, and whine that there was always change, as silly deniers do. One should look forward, ponder how bad it’s going to get, all too soon, and see the necessity for a carbon tax (or, more exactly, set-up worldwide carbon cost compensation).

Yes, so far we have only seen directly-man-induced global warming: the CO2 percentage went from 280 parts per million until 410 ppm (In truth, 490 ppm, as I have long explained, and will, again, below). In any case, 280 ppm up to 410 ppm, that’s an increase of 130 ppm. 130/280 = 46%. if one supposes that the obstruction CO2 presents to infrared light is proportional to its presence, then the “forcing” of the greenhouse effect should have been augmented by 46%.

Moreover, indeed, one has to add to this man-made gases which have a greenhouse effect up to 100,000 times greater than CO2. That means they capability to block infrared radiation, and so to confine heat in the lower atmosphere instead of letting it escape to the cosmos is 10,000 times greater than CO2.

Talking only CO2, while forgetting CH4 and NO2, is unscientific. Not to say stupid and criminal. Criminal in the sense of ultimate mass destruction.

Those greenhouse contributions of NON-CO2 manmade greenhouse gases amount to 25% of the total anthropomorphic contribution. So the real CO2 equivalent ppm is 490 ppm, not 410 ppm. An augmentation of more than 61% since 1789 CE. (And even that is an underestimate: because it overestimates the NO2 contribution in 1789 CE, say. In 1789 CE, there already was man-made methane, CH4, in the air, from massive pastoralism in the last 7000 years (some think that prevented a glaciation!). However, in 1789 CE, there was no NO2 whatsoever: NO2 is created only at high temperature, say by a diesel engine, when gases get hot enough to burn nitrogen in the combustion chamber!).

This is not a music the blissfully ignorant commons want to listen to. But they should:

To put all of this in perspective, the genus Homo has not evolved under such circumstances. Antarctica ice cores, 800,000 years old, show a density of CO2 of only 185 ppm.

In any case, 490 ppm, guaranteed to be 500 ppm in CO2 equivalent is well above the point at which Antarctica loses, or gains, its beech forests. 500 ppm is well above the Antarctica equilibrium point. The melting of the West Antarctica ice shield is thus guaranteed. The serious scientific question is now whether West Antarctica will melt within decades, as I believe, or centuries. That incoming disaster was long obvious. Only at the Paris Climate Conference, the IPCC, the United Nations Panel in charge of studying climate change admitted that I was right, and they were wrong, the temperature rise should be limited to ONLY 1.5 Centigrade, not to two degrees Centigrades:

Unfortunately last year, in 2016, the rise was 1.2 C, that is 80% of the way up to 1.5C… 2017, so far, runs close behind.

Exponential rise now in evidence (at last)? Look at the last few years…

(It used to be that scientists well-financed by those who loved fossil fuels, and their admirers in academic management, including university boards, and fuel plutos addicted governments pretended that the stability of West Antarctica was guaranteed for 5,000 years. Serious scientific papers full of gravitas, ladies and gentlemen, used to pontificate that no ocean would seriously rise for 5,000 years. Just like that. After all, why not say whatever, like Valley Girls, since it kept them greedsters rich and esteemed by the best with power (aristo-crats)? Scientists used to believe in the stability of the Holy Trinity, after all…)

It is strongly scientifically suspected that the last time Earth had comparable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we have today was at least three million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene (then of course there was no CH4 in level in level comparable to what we see today, as cattle was less abundant, thanks to all too many lions, and no NO2 whatsoever).

Back then, global average temperature was about 3.6–5.2°F (2–3°Centigrade) warmer than it is today. Ocean level was much higher, by about 15–25 meters. So this heat and this sea level rise are now unavoidable. Already.

The global density of carbon dioxide increased rapidly in the past couple of years, thanks in part to a strong El Niño which, lasted around two years (that unusual situation is a consequence of the strong planetary warming). El Niño patterns generally shift the location of tropical rains, often leaving tropical forests dry, thus more susceptible to fires — fires that, in turn, release a lot of stored carbon into the atmosphere. But direct human activities — like the burning of fossil fuels for transportation or electricity, or the conversion of forests and grasslands into developed areas or farmland — have also contributed to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at a rate never seen before.

Thus we see the real problem: manmade warming, from all these gases triggers supplementary effects which, by themselves, augment the warming. For example, the more ice and snow melts in the polar and mountainous areas, the more those areas absorb sunlight into the ground, augmenting the melting and warming, year around.

Man-made warming, which has been just a bit more than linear, is in danger of waking up strong exponential warming driven by natural phenomena which human activity would have triggered.

Once those strong natural exponential have been triggered, the warming will be runaway, and out of human hands. The analogy is being in a very dry forest full of deliciously smelling plants waving happily in a very hot wind. If one light a match, it will contribute to the warming, but not that much. Drop the light on the ground, watch the bushes catches fire: at this point natural warming is launched. Soon the fire gets to the crowns of the trees, an unstoppable inferno arises.

Some deniers anxious to win their daily bread, will insinuate that I am claiming that Earth will turn into Venus, without proof. No, not quite. What I am saying is subtle, and it’s experimentally backed-up by what happened in the past.

First of all, we have seen it all before, indeed, during the Permian-Trias mass extinction, 252 million years ago (more on that some other day, when, like today, I am travelling, and I have time only for an obvious essay…). Secondly, the runaway effects on Earth tend to be strongly limited after a while: if it gets way too hot, for example, there will so many clouds, from the steaming oceans, that the ground will be in permanent darkness, and, thus will cool off.

Moreover, the cause of the problem, humanity, would have been put to death, humanely or not, so Earth will have just to wait a millennium or two before enough CO2 will have been recombined in volcanic, and other soil to be removed from the air.

The present rise in CO2, and the rises of temperature and ocean acidity it brings can only be transient, on geological time scale. But it will rush, quasi-instantaneously, on such a scale, to a new equilibrium.

The carbon intense countries are playing with fire. There is so much European countries can do: France is down to 5.1 ton of CO2 emission per capita per year (and much more drastic measures have been taken, such as making carbon burning cars unlawful). The USA, Canada, Australia are above 16 tons per capita, per year. They have to be persuaded to cease and desist. The rest of the world will follow.

Burning Trump himself, for real or in effigy, may feel good, yet it is neither recommended, nor sufficient, helas…First of all, burning such a mass of decomposing carbohydrates would noticeably augment the CO2 level globally. Secondly, there has been enough words, and empty insults. It’s time for action.

The only really significant action is a global carbon tax. Even Trump, who globally ridiculed himself by rejecting the Paris Climate Accord, like a bloated brat having a fit, could regain some of his lost honor, if he blurted on the international scene, that he has understood only a carbon tax would work, and promote it.

A plutocratic propaganda media, I subscribe to, The Economist, asserted that “France and Britain declared war on Germany and Austria” in 1914. This is contains several lies (France didn’t declare war on Germany and, or Austria; Germany attacked, and declared war the next day; France and Britain didn’t declare war on Austria; actually they were at peace with Austria for several days, as, in spite of tremendous pressure from Berlin, Austria refused obstinately to declare war!)

The preceding lies from plutocratic propaganda support the myth that democratic republic like France are as bad, if not worse, than fascist, racist genocidal tyrannies as Germany was in 1914.

I posted the following: “Contrarily to what The Economist declares and pretends, France did not declare war on Germany first. Instead, Germany gave an ultimatum to neutral Belgium, then attacked Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Then Germany declared war to Belgium and France. Then Great Britain declared war to Germany, for attacking Belgium.”

Germany attacked neutral Belgium after an ultimatum on August 3, 1914 (“Grant free passage for a two million men army, or suffer occupation.”) The Germans behaved like Nazis in 1914. Why? Because they were the Nazis! As simple as that!

“France did not declare war on Germany first. Instead, Germany gave an ultimatum to neutral Belgium, then attacked Belgium, Luxembourg and France.”

You’re technically correct, and Germany probably should shoulder the greater share of the blame, but you must admit that there is a lot more nuance to the role of Germany (and especially France) than that simple telling of the course of events would lead one to believe. (and that’s before you even get to Britain’s later decision to enter the war; which for really good reasons – that I imagine many of us would still agree with – was clearly not – only – motivated by the invasion/occupation of Belgium).”

I guess Germany should shoulder the greater share of the blame for Auschwitz too! Wow! (That would mean that those roasted at Auschwitz, just as the thousands of Belgian civilians massacred by the German fascists in August 1914, including two-year old girls, should shared some responsibility too! With morality like that, who needs psychopaths?)

This gives me the occasion to correct a ubiquitous perception that a dictatorship which attacked the world was no more at fault than a French Republic which didn’t.

You say: “Germany probably should shoulder the greater share of the blame, but you must admit that there is a lot more nuance to the role of Germany (and especially France) than that simple telling of the course of events would lead one to believe.”

Yes, who needs “courses of events”, when one can indulge in hateful bias? II “must admit”? Why? Because I love a fascist imperialist racist German plutocracy which plotted to attack the world in 1914. On December 11, 1912, six top military officers and the Kaiser secretly decided to make war “within 18 months”. They stated explicitly that they were afraid of the ramping up of the powers of democratic France and democratizing Russia. This, those commanders asserted secretly, would rapidly weaken Germany’s relative military power.

I ‘must admit” one needs to “nuance” truth? One has to be nice to a regime who had racially exterminated several populations in Namibia? Thanks in part to a commander called Goering? (Father of his famous son.)

At midnight on 31 July – 1 August the German government sent an ultimatum to Russia and announced a state of “Kriegsgefahr”.

Germany attacked France in the morning of August 2, 1914, by sending cavalry detachments deep inside France. The first French soldier killed, Caporal Peugeot, died at 10:07 hours on August 2 (his German assailant, Albert Mayer, got shot and killed in return).

The Second German Empire, not a democracy, declared war to the French REPUBLIC, a democracy, the next day, August 3, 1914. More than ten millions would die on the battlefields, thanks to fascist Germany, and another 25 millions would die indirectly, thanks to fascist, idiotic, ravenously militaristic and nationalistic, Jew and French hating Germany.

Germany then proceeded to kill dozens of thousands of innocent Belgian citizens, at least 6,000 of them in clear and demonstrable atrocities, including babies. The commander at Liege, Ludendorff, was unfortunately not hanged in 1919, as he should have been. Instead he proceeded with a further hatred campaign, the “stab in the back” theory (allegedly by Jews and Commies). Unsatisfied with this, Ludendorff founded what would become the Nazi Party (Hitler was sent to spy on it…)

As Wikipedia puts it: “The beginning of war was presented in Germany as the chance for the nation to secure “our place under the sun,” as the Foreign Minister Bernhard von Bülow had put it, which was readily supported by prevalent nationalism among the public. The Kaiser and the German establishment hoped the war would unite the public behind the monarchy, and lessen the threat posed by the dramatic growth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which had been the most vocal critic of the Kaiser in the Reichstag before the war. The SPD ended its differences with the Imperial government and abandoned its principles of internationalism to support the war effort.”

By the time of the British “first shots”, on August 22 1914, dozens of thousands of soldiers had already been killed, on the French side alone. On August 22, 1914, the French army suffered 27,000 killed in combat, in 24 hours.

Yes, twenty-seven thousands. The Huns were enraged. As the French had counter-attacked in Belgium, the Huns could only massacre Belgian civilians, in their thirst for barbaric vengeance. In one village alone, more than 100 civilians got assassinated after the French retreat. In particularly poignant case, a very well documented case, a Belgian father was bathing in a river with his two year old little girl. German troops came, and in total cold blood, assassinated both of them. Why was Auschwitz such a big surprise?

War crimes:

In some places, particularly Liège, Andenne and Leuven, but firstly Dinant, there is evidence that the violence against civilians was premeditated.[5]:573–4 However, in Dinant, the German army believed the inhabitants were as dangerous as the French soldiers themselves.[6][7] German troops, afraid of Belgian guerrilla fighters, or francs-tireurs, burned homes and executed civilians throughout eastern and central Belgium, including Aarschot (156 dead), Andenne (211 dead), Seilles (fr), Tamines (383 dead), and Dinant (674 dead).[8] The victims included men, women, and children.[9]

On August 25, 1914, the German army ravaged the city of Leuven, deliberately burning the university’s library of 300,000 medieval books and manuscripts with gasoline, killing 248 residents,[10] and expelling the entire population of 10,000. However, contrary to what many believe and write, it was not the books of the Old University of Leuven which disappeared in smoke; indeed, in 1797, the manuscripts and most valuable works of this university were transported[11] to the National Library in Paris and much of the old library was transferred to the Central School of Brussels, the official and legal successor of the Old University of Leuven. The library of the Central School of Brussels had about 80,000 volumes, which then came to enrich the library of Brussels, and then the future Royal Library of Belgium where they are still. Civilian homes were set on fire and citizens often shot where they stood.[12] Over 2000 buildings were destroyed and large quantities of strategic materials, foodstuffs, and modern industrial equipment were looted and transferred to Germany in 1914 alone. These actions brought worldwide condemnation.[13] (There were also several friendly fire incidents between groups of German soldiers during the confusion.[7]) Overall, the Germans were responsible for the killing of 23,700 Belgian civilians, (6,000 Belgians directly killed, 17,700 died during expulsion, deportation, in prison or sentenced to death by court) and caused further nonfatalities of 10,400 permanent and 22,700 temporary invalids, with 18,296 children becoming war orphans. Military losses were 26,338 killed, died from injuries or accidents, 14,029 died from disease, or went missing.[4]

In the Province of Brabant, nuns were ordered by Germans to strip naked under the pretext that they were spies or men in disguise, and were possibly violated. In and around Aarschot, between August 19 and the recapture of the town by September 9, women were repeatedly victimised. Rape was nearly as ubiquitous as murder, arson and looting, if never as visible.[5]:164–165

The Brits came to the rescue late and few, no more than one French army corps, and they retreated too much, suffering enormous loesses, but it was nice nevertheless!

One of the reasons why Nazism happened, is that racist fascist Germany was not cleaned of its satanic ideology in 1919. To start with, 1,000 German war criminals had to be tried (for show) and hanged. Instead they were left to fester, trying another world war, 25 years later..

To be moral, one has to face the music of real facts. Equating German and French actions in 1914 is a lie, fake history, and an insult to democracy (as found in France then) by assimilating democracy to a vicious, racist, fascist, tyrannical plutocracy, which didn’t hesitate to engage in a world war, just to save its privileges…

People could scoff, and say, who cares about the French? However, that was the road to Auschwitz. Nietzsche had explained this in the 1880s, forecasting that Germany was going to visit unfathomable horrors on Europe and the Jews. It’s really pathetic that, 140 years, and 140 million dead later, one has still to point out that Germany was hell bound in 1914. And that the only treatment possible was what Germany got in World War Two… Thanks to the French! (France declared war to Hitler in 1939, bringing the fall of German viciousness in less than 6 years after that!)

The confrontation between France and Germany in 1914 was between light and darkness, goodness and viciousness, democracy and fully satanic plutocracy. Learn history right, without the nuance of fashionable lies.

This gracious gesture left a lasting impression. This real fact in the real world, brought my mind to create, all on its own, a reality that had never been before. And will ever last, as far as I am concerned. It’s not just the multiverse, it’s the private multiverse.

Before you think that I am, at last, humbling admitting I am nuts, let me perfidiously add that we all do this, I am just ahead of my time, in observing it, as Nietzsche would modestly point out, if he was writing on my behalf. A core way in which wisdom progresses is by introspection. Introspection: one does not get more core than that. Deeper, more penetrating introspection is future civilization. Perceiving more correctly what perception is was central to the Quantum revolution. Don’t laugh, the inventors of Quantum Mechanics analyzed in-depth what to “experience” meant; an indignant Einstein was reminded by Heisenberg that he and his colleagues were just following the general philosophical principles set by Einstein of considering carefully what was experimentally perceived.

Last night, I had many dreams, on many things, but in one of them, pretty short, figured Barack Obama, sleeping like a babe, on a makeshift black leather couch system. A running commentary said he was sharing the (very large) room with the US military chief of staff. I was milling around. Something tense about the state of the world was coming down…

After I woke up, I remembered the dream as if it had really happened. So now in my memory system, there is a vivid picture of Obama sleeping as described above. Although it never happened. (I never met Obama in such circumstances.)

We mostly perceive… what we think. Thus the world as we perceive it, is the exact opposite of what the ancients imagined it to be.

So there was a part of my history, relative to someone else, created by my own mind in the context of the relationship with that person. And it’s pure fiction as a historical fact outside of me, yet, a historical fact as far as my neurocircuitry is concerned.

Plato never talked about such things, nor the parrots who repeated that tyrant lover, ad nauseam.

Plato’s Cave is a rather stupid, certainly very condescending picture of the universe. Moreover, it misunderstands the wall of the cave: it’s actually the universe itself, a universe we partly created ourselves, the universe of our minds, and it’s much richer than the outside world, which only excites, entices, encourages our perception further along.

This sort of self-made movies does not pertain to my fertile imagination alone. Everybody does it, although the degree of awareness of its genesis varies. From the real world input of sensations and experiences, human minds create a much more complex world amplifying that input in special ways pertaining to their own history. It’s Plato’s cave, in reverse, with much added.

***

Sad was my mood:

What happened is that, after I got the letter yesterday, I had a poignant feeling of what a waste my friend’s presidency has been. Nothing that the innocence of sleep can ever repair, however strong we imagine differently. I remembered the spark of hope, ten years ago. True, a few things were achieved by his presidency (the fact that health insurance companies can’t deny from pre-existing conditions). But much was lost too (inequality has never been so great, and Obama has his name written all over that, including the unresisted and wildly encouraged rise of tech monopolies and the demolition of the Patent System). Pluto-Democrats devoured it all…

Consider this: French president Macron declared that: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. A friend of mine asked me what I thought of that idea. I said the obvious. First “antisemitism” is a lie:”antisemitism” as Macron uses it means “antijudaism”. Palestinians are semite, still they tend to be anti-Israel, which, according to Macron, would make them “antisemite”, thus being one thing and its opposite.

Sheer madness. But no accident: an aim of the present world leadership is MAD, not just in the sense of Mutually Assured Destruction, but in the sense that, once we are mad, we won’t make sense, thus they will keep on overwhelming us, because they, and the masters they serve, know very well where they are heading: towards inflicting ever more abuse. Abuse is its own deliriously satisfying power satisfaction. (A little secret official humanists do not reveal as most of those with power partake in it!)

In green the parts of Europe and Africa under direct German military and government command. What The Vicious (?) Idiots (??) Who Claim France Ordered The Vel D’Hiv Deportation Pretend NOT to understand: Paris was under direct German Third Reich Administration, Subjugation, Enslavement, etc… It was NOT under Vichy putsch regime command (that’s in blue, early in 1942; later the Nazis overtook the entire metropolitan France).

Consider this: the preceding friend, a very educated, multilingual, upper class US citizen, told by me that the USA waited for Hitler to declare war, even after Pearl Harbor, reflectively replied:”Yes, but France had this Vichy government side with the Nazis against the Jews first.”

That is 100% false in several dimensions, each. Yet that several ways grievously erroneous opinion is pretty much ubiquitous in much of the world, inverting the basic facts of France and Nazism. The result being that the country which promulgated Human Rights the most, especially after 1789, is widely perceived as racist and vicious. Guess who profits from this? Global plutocracy, the global enemy of human rights. And who are the paymasters of our global leadership? Global plutocrats.

How did one get there? By myths promulgated by the French authorities themselves, in recent years. And why did those think it was so smart? Because all politicians, worldwide follow the smell of money, just as a viper follows the smell of the mice it just stung.

This would bring us to the touchy subject of who gave Macron the money to buy a one million Euro apartment when he was 25 years old (hint: not his parents, but some very wealthy people). It’s so touchy, I will leave it alone. As my mom said: ”Macron is president, and that’s it.”

Macron just tweeted: Emmanuel Macron‏Verified account: “Je crois à la logique de la confiance…” “I believe in the logic of trust”. Yes, how can one trust France which, according to its president “organized… the death of 13,152 [Jewish] persons”?

Let me reassure you right away: “France” did NOT organize said death of 13,152 persons. Under direct, nearly explicitly lethal, if disobeyed, Nazi orders, French police organized the arrest of (more or less then) illegal foreigners and refugees on Nazi occupied French soil. Not glorious, but the alternative was death at Nazis’ hands for disobedient police (of which there were plenty; ultimately Parisian police would rise in armed rebellion against the Nazis, two years later, when said rebellion was not just suicide). Our great leaders tend to take so many short circuits with truth that their logics blow up, in the maw of reality. This enable them to zap us. Inurement to blowing up of the logics we are submitted and accustomed to, enables our leaders to zap us further.

Thus reality is neither what our great “chiefs” sell, or buy. Madness is more like it.

(An example is the vaunted “Two States solution” in Israel-Palestine which is neither a state, nor a solution.)

***

Mythomania, or how to manipulate We the Peoples:

A head of state is at the head of myths. A head of state speaks with acts. The head of state speaks, even with silence. A head of state can speak with courage. Or cowardice. Or reason, or, even, to future history with future conspiracies, to be unveiled some day.

Except when they are raw truth, those myths are made to manipulate people. The more distant from truth the myth are, the more manipulative. I am a partisan of raw truth. I have found it the best fuel for human destiny.

Hitler described and used what he called the Big Lie technique. There are other methods, though, more akin to the “esprit de finesse” extolled by Macron, the French President. Basic dynamics help to understand what is going on. One Big Lie is the equivalent of a high acceleration: after it, one goes far, fast. But a succession of little lies equivalent to a sum of little accelerations will get you even further, because little lies are harder to detect, and one may be left with dozens of them in just one system of thought, after neutralizing a few. Instead, Nazism rested on less than half a dozen Big Lies.

***

I will illustrate in a further essay how approximations and liberties taken with history can sum up as giant lies, with the case of macron and the Vel d’Hiv. Such lies deserve it, the planet shares them all, and they are used as an excuse to ditch the Enlightenment.

The enemies of France love to confuse the French and the (German!) Nazis. That the latest self-described “chief” of France deems important to promote that identification is an indication of how rotten the head of civilization has become.

Tell me Macron, why is it so crucially important to tell the world that France went “Heil Hitler!” in 1942? Blaming the victim is real foremost? Just a month after Bir Hakiem, when a small French army removed the last hope the Nazis had to win the Second World War?

At Bir Hakeim, the French army of general Marie-Pierre Kœnig delayed by several weeks one of these sickle move of general Edwin Rommel was expert at. Rommel was going to encircle the defeated and retreating British Eighth Army, the only anti-Nazi significant military force between England and India (with 110,000 soldiers, 850 tanks). Rommel knew that, as he put it “the fate of my army was at stake“. Actually Rommel knew all too well that the fate of the Reich was at stake.

The Nazi plan was to seize Egypt, then kill all the Jews of Israel, and capture Iraqi oil, desperately needed by the Nazi war machine. In the aftermath of the Nazi defeat at Bir Hakeim, Hitler declared to his cabinet that the French were indeed the world’s best soldiers with his own Nazi soldiers. He added that, thus that’s why exactly Nazi-occupied France had to be completely destroyed, so she couldn’t never rise again.

Bir Hakeim should be as, or more famous than Thermopylae. There 300 Spartans delayed the Persian juggernaut invading Greece by three days. They all died in combat, refusing to surrender. At Bir Hakeim, the French army delayed the Nazi-Italian fascist juggernaut by three weeks. Officially, the French had 141 killed in combat at Bir Hakeim. However, out of 3,700 French soldiers fighting, more than 1,500 disappeared one way or another (many died in the desert during confused night action; the French would burrow in the day, counterattack at night).

Bir Hakeim forced the Nazis to make an all-out assault towards the Caucasus, to get its oil, which they desperately needed, and, to protect their flank they had to seize the military-industrial city of Stalingrad (although they faced enormous Soviet forces on the way there). That was extremely risky, and the Nazi army was encircled many times in its desperate assault towards Stalingrad (where it would be, unsurprisingly, annihilated).

The highest Nazis (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich…) had to make the other top Nazi leaders understand, at the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, in Berlin, 6 months before the Vel d’Hiv, that they should not stand in the way of the “final solution”.

But all Macron wants children of the world to learn from history is that: “France organized… the death of 13,152 [Jewish] persons”? With “chiefs” like that, who needs suicide?

Usually, when thinking of man, one thinks of something noble, higher, ponderate, endowed with Roman “gravitas”, wise. To put it in one expression: Homo Sapiens.

However, where does all this wisdom come from? Experiments! And how, why, would one experiment? By going crazy! Craziness, and a love for extremes. Why? Because: Extremes instructs.

Wingsuit Flier Above French Alps. The rocky twin tower below the flier is the Drus, where yours truly made a semi-demented first ascent (on the other side). I had been a bit riled, after being nearly wiped out by the biggest rock avalanche I ever saw. However the entire pillar collapsed from greenhouse warming a few years later… Demonstrating the lightness of being even with the heaviest mountains.

Going to extremes is how science is made. Every paradigm shattering experiment in physics consists into forcing nature into an extreme apparatus (be it a telescope, microscope, Stern-Gerlach device, cyclotron, or forcing a virus into circumstances which weaken it, until it can be injected for vaccination, etc.).

Going to extremes happen even in mathematics: there, researchers typically play first with baby examples (which are extreme in the sense of being extremely simple, or extremely computable, etc.). For these extremes, they excavate general principles that they then rework in a general theory. (For example, the general theory of curved spaces, pre-Euclid, and before the invention of connection theory by Levi-Civita, assumed spaces with constant curvature, such as the surface of the Earth; that was extreme, in the sense of extremely simple.)

So here we are, and our power has exceeded our planet. To save our environment, we need to extent it through the galaxy, commensurate to our power. We can’t dial back power: our earthly environment, which we have already mauled, will be the first to succumb. So all speed forward, beyond all the last frontiers…

Extreme behaviors have always characterized man. Because we experiment, and experiments are, by definition, risky. “Per” meant risk, initially. To engage in risky behavior, we need extreme passion, like the heroes of Homer.

“Plus Oultre!” as Charles Quint put it in his native French: More Beyond!

Science itself is a love of extreme: the meta-motivation of science is to go beyond whatever was figured out prior.

Experienced extreme-sports enthusiasts are often not reckless, nor do they have some sort of Freudian death wish. Instead, “older” extreme athletes — those who are past their mid-20s — exercise deep care proportional to the high risk involved by the art they specialize in. The analogy with science is striking. Most practitioners of extremely dangerous sports are highly intelligent people, methodological and systematic. They spend years studying the environment and the mechanics involved in order to make it as safe as it possibly can be, in that general framework of extreme danger.

And generally, they have a an extreme goal in mind. The French specialist of wingsuits, who launched the modern version of the sport, wanted to achieve controlled wingsuit landings (he died in Hawai’i, probably from confusion in a jump to resulting from jet lag).

It is often said, and observed, that humans can be, or are, evil. This is caused, in part, by the love of extremes, the love of experiment.

So is it the love of understanding which pushes to extremes, or the love of extremes which pushes towards understanding? That’s a chicken and egg problem: they evolved together, and are not really distinguishable, being both unavoidable parts of the same mechanism.

This also explains why top thinkers all too often get hated and ridiculously molested: as per their art, they are forced to be, in some ways, extreme. At least, relative to the commons. The founder of cynic philosophy Diogenes of Sinope and his admirer the extremely cleverAlexander the Great understood this perfectly well.

Of course the New York Times does not. It does not want to. That plutocratic media calls “provocateurs” “hate mongers”, and explain they have to be violently censored to prevent “torment”! Says the NYT: “By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.”

By all means”? Really? Was not the point of the NYT the exact opposite?

I do agree that speech can be violence. However, to explicitly point at people who “provoke” thoughts, and accuse them of causing “torment” is not understanding that we gain insight from extremes.

Thus, the New York Times’ theory of censoring all my comments was grounded in a conspiratorial theory to avoid inflicting torment on plutocrats.

Some will say I am incoherent: I condemned “thought crimes” long ago, and asked for a “Minister of Truth” (underlying the minister of Justice). However the difference are significant: the Qur’an calls to kill some category of people (the Bible does the same, but less… Actually Qur’an refers approvingly to the death sentence against homosexuals in the Bible). If that’s preached as a part of the religion, which it is, stricto sensu, that’s incitation to murder. If done to children it adds child abuse, child endangerment, child pornography, corruption of the youth, etc.

Whereas the New York Times has actively censored scholars who disagree on Quantitative Easing, the capture of politics by plutocracy, calling Islamophobia racism, or whether Christianism terror caused the decline and fall of the Roman State.

The problem with avoiding confrontation in the guise of comfort, is that extremes instruct. No confrontation, no instruction. The New York Times affects not to understand that (in truth it’s just serving the multibillionaire plutocrats who own it, and are hateful of all those who disparage their status).

A young Egyptian yesterday swam to a resort. There, he killed by stabbing, two German tourists. Captured, he recognized that he had “espoused the ideas of Jihadism”. Jihadism in the sense of the literal Qur’an is a vicious ideology incompatible with civilization. Literal Koranic Jihadism is an example of a mentality espousing ideas and practices revealed to be too extreme when they lead to kill innocent people.

Absent real killing and injuring of people, anything should go in the realm of ideas. Fiction literature and movies (even documentaries) are all about letting imagination roam.

And it better. Because only ever more true ideas will save humanity, and those are born at very high temperature, so high old mental automatisms can melt the erroneous past in a fiery embrace.

Extreme behaviors are us. Including the worst, they are necessary to think forward and anew. There lays survival, and nowhere else.